Bomber's Moon by Alex Beecroft

Author:Alex Beecroft [Beecroft, Alex]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Samhain Publishing, Ltd.
Published: 2012-04-02T12:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

Chris rubbed his gritty eyes and swallowed the last mouthful of his third cup of coffee. This early in the day the Red Lion was pretty much his to call his own, but for the barmaid. She kept the coffee topped up between stints in the kitchen and long periods of sitting with her stilettoed heels up, headphones in her ears, reading The Da Vinci Code at a rate of a page an hour.

Listening to the tinny beat of the music from her earphones, he could sympathise with the rate of progress. He looked down again at the accounting notebook, all lines and columns and subheadings, and realised he had forgotten to carry over the subtotal of hall rental until June and add to it the fifty pounds he had slipped to Stan to compensate the lad’s parents for the amount they spent on electricity and strange electronic components. His crew might all be volunteers, but it didn’t mean he wanted them out of pocket because of it.

He fished in his pockets for receipts, spread them out on the table in front of him and tried to remember what they were for. That one at least, folded into four and still otherwise uncrumpled, was the receipt for the box of chocs that sat in its plastic bag by his feet. Better not put that on the business accounts or Grace would have his guts for garters.

Yawning, he put his head in his hands and rubbed small circles over his eyebrows. He felt muzzy and confused and worried and itchingly alive for the first time in years. Aware of himself, physically, as he hadn’t been since…

Since the hospital, in fact. Since he’d woken up in a hospital bed to find that was the beginning of the nightmare rather than the end.

Chris pushed his chair back and got up, stretching against the pull of muscles protesting his long run this morning. The memory of this morning with Ben blushed in his stomach like an ember. If he breathed on it, it flared into life, filling him with tingling heat and hunger.

So he shouldn’t be taking time out from his accounts to think about it, should he?

The hissing tink that was all he could hear of the barmaid’s music was the only sound in the sleepy room for a moment, and then on an impulse, he went over to the jukebox and looked through their “nostalgia” collection. Maybe losing himself in the past a moment would help him to forget how Ben had looked this morning, impeccably shaved, impeccably dressed, cufflinks at his wrists, wearing his well-cut suit the way men used to wear their clothes, in Chris’s day, with elegance and understated style.

Chris fed the machine with coins, waited while it ticked through its thoughts, and almost winced under the onslaught of homesickness and trumpets. She had a voice like a bugle, Vera Lynn, and what had happened to that accent, the speech that said you cared about every word enough

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